Google Hangouts - 2 Months After

After two months, very few updates have been released for Google Hangouts. While I'm pretty happy with the mobile app (apart from not being able to zoom in on photos), a lot is still desired on the desktop side.

A Chrome extension replaced the native Windows app. However this is severely lacking. It feels heavier than the older Google Talk app, and after a few hours of uses it feels considerably slower. Chrome has been getting heavier throughout the years, and such extensions will only continue to increase the CPU and memory usage.

However my biggest annoyance is that there is no way to disable the annoying sound notification for each and every message received. There are a number of alternative solutions such as blocking the sound by using AdBlock but certainly such a feature should be one of the first options to be included. However, 2 months on, such an option has never surfaced.

My biggest disappointed is that I expected a higher development rate of this messaging client to make it simply the best messaging app out there on all platforms. However after 2 months, I have not seen such a development rate. I prefer incremental updates to one update each year.